AI Agents Outperform Mid-Pack SDRs

SaaStr's AI Agent Revolution: Replacing SDRs with Trained AI Agents

Jason Lemkin's SaaStr business transformed its sales organization from 10 humans to just 1.2 humans plus 20 AI agents, maintaining the same level of performance while dramatically improving efficiency. The key to this success wasn't simply deploying AI tools, but properly training them with the company's best sales content.

The most critical insight from this transformation was that well-trained AI agents can consistently outperform mid-level and underperforming human SDRs. Lemkin discovered that most sales emails sent by humans aren't actually that good to begin with. While the very best salespeople might spend hours researching prospects and crafting perfect, personalized messages, the average SDR typically relies on generic templates with minimal customization.

"The emails that the AIs write are pretty good," Lemkin explains. "If you're getting terrible emails, it's a poorly trained product from a bad vendor." The secret is taking what works from your best performers and using that as the foundation for your AI agents:

1. Identify your top-performing sales rep and their most effective email templates
2. Upload these templates to train your AI agent
3. Connect the agent to your data sources (like Salesforce) so it can lightly personalize messages
4. Let the agent iterate and A/B test variations of your best content

"Train it on your best [content] and it'll be pretty good," Lemkin says. The AI can then personalize these messages at scale, especially when connected to website visitor tracking and other data sources.

Interestingly, Lemkin found that transparency about whether emails come from AI or humans doesn't significantly impact results: "We've tried both... what we've learned is now we just send it and no one cares." Sometimes they even receive responses like "I can tell this is an AI but it's pretty good, can I do a meeting?"

The power of this approach is that it takes your best-performing content and scales it across your entire prospect base, 24/7, without the inconsistency of human performance. While AI can't yet match the very best enterprise salespeople working high-value accounts, it dramatically outperforms the mid-pack SDRs who often don't know products well or follow up consistently.

For companies looking to implement this approach, Lemkin emphasizes that it's not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. You need someone (like SaaStr's Chief AI Officer who spends 20% of her time on this) constantly monitoring, training, and improving the agents. But the payoff is enormous: the ability to engage with your entire prospect base at a level of quality that was previously impossible with human-only teams.